Bench work · cards, sticks and photo drives
USB sticks and camera cards begin at £250 + VAT, put in writing after a free look, and two or three working days covers most of them. One instruction comes before all of that, though: stop using the card. A deletion removes an index entry, nothing more. A format in the camera puts a new empty index over the old. And a card the camera claims it cannot open is frequently in perfect health once it gets to a bench. In all three cases your frames stay put where they were written, right up until something new is laid on top. What follows: what a free download really hands you, why a 50MB RAW gets home at a tenth of its weight, and the way a frame is put back together entire. We take cards, sticks, external drives and whole computers, for Nottingham, Beeston, Chesterfield and Newark-on-Trent. No phones.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A folder deleted by mistake | Only the index entry goes. The picture itself sits where it was, readable, until fresh data lands on top | Pull the card and leave it alone |
| The camera ran a format | An empty index goes over the old one, and what lies beneath it is usually whole | Strong odds if you stopped shooting |
| 'Memory card error', with an offer to reformat | A corrupted index. Pictures beneath it are generally untouched | Refuse that offer, every time it appears |
| Files came back and not one of them opens | What you have there are screen previews, or a first fragment of each frame | The complete frames are almost certainly still on it |
| Colour banding across a RAW, or grey along its bottom edge | Either the frame was laid down across separate runs, or something has overwritten part of it | Rebuilt to the manufacturer's layout |
| A video clip that will not open | One 4K clip fragments across a card far more than any still does | Joined back on true frame boundaries |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Sector by sector, your card is cloned before anything else happens, and every step after that runs against the clone. Back the original goes, exactly as it arrived.
Mend the table and it all returns as you had it — names, folder tree, and the date the camera stamped on each one. Where it will not mend, carving takes over: each format gets read against whatever specification its maker published, and a whole RAW frame is rebuilt from however many runs it had been spread across. A preview is not a result.
No job leaves here until each frame that came back has gone up on a monitor at 100% for somebody to look at. Counts in a report prove nothing whatever. The full-size picture is what proves it.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
What happens to a card afterwards decides the job: put it on a shelf the moment you notice, and the odds favour you. Keep shooting, and each fresh exposure has to go somewhere — very often right across the frames you were hoping to get back. There is no charge for stopping and none for the look. Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT, quoted in writing, and on most jobs no fee falls due unless your pictures come back.
The card had been left alone since the wedding — nothing written to it, no new frames — which is why the copy lifted off it cleanly. A free utility had already been at it and produced six hundred thumbnails, none of them printable. Rebuilding each CR3 from its scattered fragments put all 640 back at full size.
For a small JPEG off a card that went straight onto a shelf, quite often. For RAW, and for video, no. Programs of that sort count everything they come across, and the preview living inside a frame registers as a find, so the total looks encouraging while your folder quietly fills with offcuts. Take a clone of the card first. Work out what one real file ought to weigh, then go back and look at the totals.
Two things account for almost all of it. Either a program pulled the small preview out of your RAW and abandoned the frame, or it grabbed the first piece only of a picture laid down across several runs and stopped there. Either way, the sensor data is usually still present. Read a frame the way its own maker documented it and the thing reassembles, so long as the space it occupied has not been written over since.
Usually not. All a format does is put an empty directory over the old one; the pictures themselves remain where they were originally laid down. Shelve the card at that moment and the odds are strongly on your side. Every frame shot after it eats into them.
No. Handsets and tablets sit outside this lab's work, and nothing is exempt from that. Wherever the pictures were copied to, though, we can help: a card, an external, a laptop, or that folder of HEIC files which appears on a computer the first time a handset gets plugged into it. Post one of those and we can begin. Keep the phone — and better to find this out now than after a parcel has gone.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.